Hello everyone,

We (most of the current staff at the Wikimedia Foundation currently engaging in research) had a chance to meet some of you at Wikisym and Wikimania this year and thought it would be nice to introduce ourselves and say hi to all of you!  All of us have joined WMF in the past two years and are working on projects or research questions that may be relevant or of interest to all of you.  Also, as far as I know, we are all new to this list and will hopefully be talking and collaborating with you more in the future - both here and on the Meta Research page.   

So, in no particular order, some introductions from all of us: 

From Nimish (ngautam@wikimedia.org):  Hi, I'm Nimish Gautam. I started with the foundation in 2009 doing development for the Usability Initiative, which focused on new editors. I like analyzing user behavior to figure out how people use the tools we give them (turning templates into a programming language, who would've guessed?) and spotting trends so we can improve those tools to help people accomplish what it is they're trying to do. Currently I'm doing qualitative and quantitative research on user behavior for the foundation and its various projects, and very interested in finding ways of chunking all this information together to make pretty, compelling, informative resources so people know what's going on in the wikiverse and hopefully want to be a part of it.

From Howie (hfung@wikimedia.org):  Hello!  I'm Howie and I'm a Senior Product Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation.  As a product person, I'd like to work with the community towards more data-driven decision making.  One area I'm particularly interested in is getting a better understanding of our user's lifecycle with our projects -- how they come to the projects, how they start contributing, their experiences as a contributor, why they leave, and why they return.  I like to use both quantitative and qualitative methods to obtain as complete a picture as we need to guide our decisions.  On the quantitative side,  I'm working on getting better web analytics for our projects.  I'm also interested in any data mining projects along these lines (e.g., contribution behavior, user lifecycle patterns, etc.).  On the qualitative side, I worked on the "Why Editors Leave Wikipedia" survey and would be interested in other qualitative measurements (e.g., interviews, surveys, focus groups).  If you're interested in any of the above topics, please drop me a line.

From Amy (aroth@wikimedia.org):  Hi, I'm Amy, the Research Analyst for the Public Policy Initiative. My task is to assess the project's impact on: U.S. public policy article quality, public policy categorization, new articles, and new contributors. Through the project I have focused on article quality assessment, and worked with the community to add a quantitative value to the current article assessment. As a data analyst, I am interested in improving data accessibility from Wikipedia. In my dreams, I envision data from the assessment tools that exist within Wikipedia are captured in a real-time database, so that we can observe what is currently happening in Wikipedia and how it is evolving in the present, rather than having to use data dumps to get snapshots of the state of Wikipedia. I have experience analyzing and designing surveys and would like to use that experience to take a more in depth look at contributor demographics and motivations. I am excited to be a part of this huge collaborative project with a mission to make knowledge accessible.

>From me, Parul Vora (pvora@wikimedia.org):  Hi Everyone!  I'm a researcher and designer with a focus on participatory and collaborative spaces.  I started at the Wikimedia Foundation in 2009 and moving forward have interest in:  creating new forms of participation (beyond editing) on the projects that better engage a wider audience with the content and each other; assessing, evaluating and addressing the demographic and cultural biases in our projects; and exploring location, culture and language as they affect the development patterns of different language Wikipedias in an effort to identify potential for experimentation and catalysis in younger projects.  I'm currently exploring the potential effect feedback systems (article ratings, expert reviews, visualizations of an article's history or a user's contributions) can have on the engagement of readers, actions of editors, and the quality of content over time.  I like infovis, ux research, and unresearched innovation and I am interested in learning more about research with wikipedia on motivation, behavioral economic modeling and/or game theory, using geolocative data, mobile experiences, and profiling and trend visualizations......and your work too! 

Let us know if you're interested in learning more, participating in, or contributing to our efforts.  And drop any of us a line if we could learn from or contribute to what you've been working on.......

Thanks so much,
Nimish, Howie, Amy, and Parul.